Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  I looked up and realized that he hadn’t wanted me to answer him. He’d wanted to know more than I did. I think it was the “not intelligent enough” comment still bothering him. But part of me wanted to please him, and as the pain subsided, that compulsion grew stronger.

  “You are much stronger than I thought,” I said to distract myself from this new facet of the goblet’s effect. Or maybe I said it to please him.

  He stared at me. I couldn’t tell if he liked hearing that or not. Finally he drew up the sleeves of his dress shirt to show me that he wore a silver band around each wrist. “Bracers of giant strength,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Those aren’t bracers. Those are bracelets or maybe wristlets. Bracers are longer. They were used—”

  “Shut up,” he gritted. He closed the wardrobe and kept his back to me for a moment. “You love me,” he said. “You think I’m the handsomest man you’ve ever seen.”

  I fought it. I did. I fought his voice as hard as I’ve ever fought anything.

  But it’s hard to fight your own heart, especially when he was so handsome. Until that moment, no man had competed with Adam for sheer breathtaking male beauty—but his face and form palled beside Tim.

  Tim turned to me and stared into my eyes. “You want me,” he said. “More than you wanted that ugly doctor you were dating.”

  Of course I did. Desire made my body go languid and I arched my back a little. The pain in my arm was nothing to the desire I felt.

  “The walking stick makes you rich,” I told him as he put a knee on the bed. “The fae know I have it and they want it back.” I tried to brace up on my elbow so I could kiss him, but my arm didn’t work right. My other hand did, but it was already reaching up to caress the soft skin of his neck. “They’ll get it, too. They have someone who knows how to find it.”

  He pulled my hand away.

  “It’s at your work?”

  “It should be.” After all, it followed me wherever I went. And I was going to go to my office. This beautiful man would take me.

  He ran a hand over my breast, squeezed too hard, then released it and stood up. “This can wait. Come with me.”

  My love had me drink some more from the goblet before we took his car to go to my office. I couldn’t remember what it was that we were looking for there, but he’d tell me when we got there. That’s what he told me. We were on 395 headed toward East Kennewick when he unzipped his jeans.

  A trucker, passing us, honked his horn. So did the car in the other lane when Tim swerved too much and almost had a wreck.

  He swore and pulled me off him. “We’ll do that where there aren’t so many cars,” he said, sounding breathless and almost giddy. He had me zip his pants again, because he couldn’t manage. It was hard with only one hand, so I used the other one, too, ignoring the pain it caused.

  When I’d finished, I looked out the window and wondered why my arm hurt so badly and why I was sick to my stomach. Then he picked the cup off the floor where it had fallen and gave it to me.

  “Here, drink this.”

  There was dirt on the outside of the cup, but the inside was full—which didn’t make sense. It had been on its side on the floor mat under my feet. There shouldn’t be any liquid there at all.

  Then I remembered it was a fairy thing.

  “Drink,” he said again.

  I quit worrying about how it had happened, and took a sip.

  “Not like that,” he said. “Drink the whole glass. Austin took two sips this morning and did exactly what I told him to do. You sure you aren’t fae?”

  I upended the goblet, drinking as fast as I could, though some of it spilled over and poured stickily down my neck. When it was empty, I looked for a place to set it. It didn’t seem right to put it on the floor. Finally I managed to make the cup holder on my door fit around it.

  “No,” I told him. “I’m not fae.”

  I set my hands on my lap and watched them clench into fists. When the highway dropped us into east Kennewick, I told him how to find my shop.

  “Would you shut up?” he said. “That noise is getting on my nerves. Take another drink.”

  I hadn’t realized I was making noise. I reached up and felt my vocal cords, which were indeed vibrating. The growl I’d been hearing must be me. It stopped as soon as I became aware of it. The cup was full again when I reached for it.

  “That’s better.”

  He pulled into the parking lot and parked in front of the office.

  I was so jittery that I had trouble opening the door of the car, and even when I was out, I was shaking like a junkie.

  “What’s the code?” he asked, standing in front of the door.

  “One, one, two, zero,” I told him through the chattering of my teeth. “It’s my birthday.”

  The little light on the top switched from red to green: something in me relaxed and my jitters settled down.

  He took my keys and opened the door, then locked it behind us. He looked through the office for a while, even pulling the step ladder over so he could get up high on the parts shelves. After a few minutes he started pulling things off the shelves and dumping them on the floor. A thermostat housing hit the cement floor and cracked. I would have to remember to reorder it, I thought. Maybe Gabriel could go through the parts and see what we could salvage. If I had to repay Zee, I couldn’t afford to lose too much inventory.

  “Mercy!” Suddenly Tim’s face replaced the thermostat housing in my view. He looked angry, but I didn’t think it had anything to do with the housing.

  He hit me, so it must have been my fault that he was angry. He obviously wasn’t used to fighting. Even with his borrowed strength, he only managed to knock me back a couple of steps. It hurt to breathe afterward; I recognized the feeling. One of my ribs was cracked or broken.

  “What?” he asked.

  I cleared my throat and told him again, “You need to get your thumb out of your fist before you hit someone or you’ll break it.”

  He swore and stormed out of the office and out to the car. When he came back, he had the goblet.

  “Drink,” he said. “Drink it all.”

  I did and the jitters got worse.

  “I want you to focus,” he said. “Where is the walking stick?”

  “It wouldn’t be in here,” I told him solemnly. “It only stays places where I live. Like the Rabbit or my bed.”

  “What?”

  “It will be in the garage.” I let him into the heart of home.

  The bay nearest the office was empty, but so was the other bay—which worried me until I remembered that the Karmann Ghia I’d been restoring was out getting more work done. Upholstery.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he said dryly. “Whoever Carmine is. Now where’s the walking stick?”

  It was lying across the top of my second biggest tool chest as if I’d set it down casually when I got some other tool. Clever stick. It hadn’t been there when we walked into the garage, but I doubt Tim had noticed.

  Tim picked it up and ran his hands over it. “Gotcha,” he said.

  Not for long. I must not have said it out loud—or else maybe he didn’t hear me. I was babbling again, so maybe it just had bled in with the rest of the words that were leaving my mouth. I took a breath and tried to direct what I said.

  “Was it worth killing O’Donnell for?” I asked him. A dumb question but maybe it could keep my thoughts focused. He’d told me that, that I needed to focus.

  As soon as the thought occurred to me, my head quit feeling so muzzy.

  He caressed the stick. “I’d have killed O’Donnell for pleasure,” he said. “Like I did my father. The walking stick, the cup, they were gravy.” He laughed a little. “Very nice gravy.”

  He leaned it against the tool chest and then turned to me.

  “I think this is the perfect place,” he said.

  He might have been handsome, but the expression on his face wasn’t.

  “So it was all a game,” he said.
“All the talk of King Arthur and the flirting. Was that guy even your boyfriend?”

  He was talking about Samuel. “No,” I said.

  It was the truth. But I could have said it in a way that wouldn’t make him angry. Why did I want my love angry with me?

  Because I liked it when he was angry. But the picture that ran through my head was Adam, punching the bathroom door frame. So angry. Magnificent. And I knew to the bottom of my soul that he’d never turn that great strength against anyone he loved.

  “So you were just using the doctor to shake up the situation, huh? And you invaded”—he liked the sound of that, so he said it again—“invaded my home. What did you think? Poor geek, he never gets any. What a loser. He’ll be grateful for a few crumbs, eh?” He grabbed me by the shoulders. “What did you think? Flirt with the geek a little and he’ll fall in love?”

  I had worried that he’d take it too seriously—once I realized I’d been flirting. “Yes,” I said.

  He shoved me with an inhuman sound and I stumbled back, then fell hard, knocking into a rolling tool tray that spilled a few tools on the ground.

  “You’ll do it with me,” he said, breathing hard. “You’ll do it with the poor pathetic loser—and you’ll like it…no, be grateful to me.” He looked around frantically, then noticed I was carrying the cup. “You drink. Drink it all.”

  It was hard. My stomach was so full. I wasn’t thirsty, but with his words ringing in my ear, I couldn’t do anything else. And the magic in it burned.

  He took the cup from me and set it on the ground, next to the walking stick.

  “You’ll be so grateful to me and you’ll know that you’ll never feel anything like it again.” He dropped to his knees beside me. His beautiful skin was flushed an ugly red. “When I finish…when I leave—you won’t be able to stand it all alone, because you know that no one will ever love you after I’m done. No one. You’ll go to the river and swim until you can’t swim anymore. Just like Austin did.”

  He unzipped his jeans, and I knew with bleak certainty that he was right. No one would love me after this. Adam would never love me after this. I might as well drown myself when I lost my love, just as my foster father had.

  “Quit crying,” he said. “What do you have to cry about? You want this. Say it. You want me.”

  “I want you,” I said.

  “Not like that. Not like that.” He reached out and grabbed the end of the walking stick and used it to knock the cup over, so it rolled toward him. He dropped the stick and grabbed the cup.

  “Drink,” he said.

  I don’t remember exactly what happened from there. The next remotely clear thought I had was when my hand touched something smooth and old, something that spread its coolness up my arm when I closed my hand over it.

  I stared at Tim’s face. His eyes were closed as he made animal grunts, but almost as if he felt the intensity of my gaze, they opened.

  The angle was bad, so I didn’t try anything fancy. I just shoved the silver end of the walking stick into his face, visualizing it going through his eye and out the back of his skull.

  It didn’t, of course. I didn’t have the strength of giants, or even of werewolves. There is only so much force you can gather when you are flat on your back hitting someone who is on top of you. But I hurt him.

  He reared back and I scrambled away, dropping the stick as I moved. I knew where there was a better weapon. I ran to the counter, where my big crowbar sat right where I’d put it after prying the engine I was replacing this afternoon that extra quarter of an inch.

  I could have run away. I could have shifted into my coyote form and run while he was distracted. But I had nowhere to run. No one could love me after tonight. I was all alone.

  I’d learned to make the strange noises that seem to go along with all the martial arts—though part of me had always winced away at the stupid sounds. As I raised the crowbar as if it were a spear, the sound I made came from the depths of my anger and despair. Somehow it didn’t sound stupid at all.

  He was strong, but I was faster. When I closed with him, he grabbed my right arm, the one he’d already injured, and squeezed.

  I screamed, but not in pain. I was too far gone to feel something as finite as physical pain. I shoved the end of the pry bar into his stomach with my left hand.

  He dropped, vomiting and wheezing, to the ground. Even with only my left hand to guide it, the pry bar was heavy enough to crush his skull when I brought it down on his head.

  Part of me wanted to beat his head in until there was nothing left but splinters of bone. Part of me knew I loved him. But I didn’t give in to love. Not with Samuel so long ago, not with Adam, and not with Tim.

  I didn’t bring the pry bar back down on his head—I had something more important to do.

  But no matter how hard I hit it, the iron bar did nothing to the cup. It didn’t make sense because the cup was clearly made of pottery and iron broke through most fae enchantments. I chipped up cement, but I couldn’t so much as put a smudge on that damned cup with the pry bar.

  I was searching for a sledgehammer, tracking blood and other stuff all over my garage, when I heard a car engine being revved hard as it peeled around a corner.

  I knew that engine.

  It was Adam, but he was too late. He couldn’t love me anymore.

  He would be so angry with me.

  I had to hide. He didn’t love me so he might hurt me when he was angry. When he calmed down, that would hurt him. I didn’t want him hurting because of me.

  There was nowhere for a person to hide. So I wouldn’t be a person. My eyes fell on the shelves that lined the far back corner. A coyote could hide there.

  I changed, and on three legs scrambled up the shelves and slipped behind a couple of big boxes of belts. The shadows were dark.

  There was a crash from the office as Adam proved that a deadbolt lock is no protection against an angry werewolf. I cowered a little lower.

  “Mercy.” He didn’t shout. He didn’t need to.

  The voice carried and swept me up in its liquid rage. It didn’t sound like Adam, but it was. I pulled back from the boxes just a little so that they would quit shaking.

  What came through the door into the garage was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The closest I’d seen was one of the between forms a werewolf takes on when he’s changing. But this one was more complete than that, as if the between form had become finished and useful. He was covered from top to tail with black fur and his hands looked very functional—as did his teeth-laden muzzle. He stood upright, but not like a man. His legs were caught halfway between human and wolf.

  Adam.

  I had only an instant to take it in, because Adam caught sight of Tim’s body. With a roar that hurt my ears, he was upon him, ripping and tearing with those huge claws. It was horrifying, terrifying…and part of me wished it was I who was being torn to shreds.

  It would only hurt for an instant and then it would be over. I panted with pain and fear, but stayed where I was because Tim had told me that I was to find the river instead. And I didn’t want to hurt Adam.

  Werewolves filtered in cautiously from the office. Ben and Honey, both still in human form—I wondered how they did that with Adam in a frenzy. Maybe something about this halfway form protected them…but then Darryl followed. He had a grimace on his face and sweat glistened on his forehead and darkened his rib-knit shirt. His control was allowing the others to keep from being caught up in Adam’s rage.

  They looked around the garage though they stayed near the door and away from Adam.

  “Do you see her?” Darryl asked softly.

  “No,” said Ben. “I’m not sure she’s still here—do you smell…”

  His voice stopped because Adam dropped an arm (not one of his) and focused on Ben.

  “Obviously,” Darryl said in a strained voice, “we all smell her terror.” He knelt on one knee, like a man proposing to his beloved.

  Ben dropped to both k
nees and bowed his head. Honey did the same, and their attention was all for Adam.

  “Where is she?” His voice was guttural and oddly accented from speaking out of a mouth meant for howling rather than talking.

  “We will look, sir.” Darryl’s voice was very quiet.

  “She’s here,” said Ben in a rush. “She’s hiding from us.”

  Adam’s great mouth opened and he roared, more like a bear at that moment than a wolf. He dropped to all fours—and I expected him to complete the change, to become all wolf. But he didn’t. I could feel him pull on the power of the pack and they gave it to him. Either it was easier to change from a transitional stage, or the pack sped his way, but it wasn’t five minutes before Adam stood naked and human in the harsh fluorescent light.

  He took a deep breath and stretched out his neck, the crack of his vertebrae loud in the silent garage. When he was finished, all that was left of the wolf was the scent of his anger and the amber of his eyes.

  “She’s still here?” he asked. “You can tell?”

  “Her scent is all over,” Ben answered. “I can’t track her. But she’d have found a corner to hide in. She wouldn’t have run.” He said the last sentence absently as his eyes drifted over the shop.

  “Why not?” asked Darryl, his voice surprisingly gentle.

  Ben inhaled as if the question startled him. “Because you only run if you have hope. You saw what he did, heard what he told her. She’s here.”

  They’d watched, I thought, remembering the technician telling me that Adam was recording from the cameras, too. They’d seen it: I was so ashamed I wanted to die. Then I remembered that I was going to and took comfort from the thought of the river, so cool and inviting.

  “Mercy?” Adam turned in a slow circle. I tucked my nose into my tail and held very still, closing my eyes and trusting my ears to tell me if they got too close. “Everything is all right, now. You can come out.”